Several years ago as my wife and I were watching the early seasons of Mad Men, we noticed that the color scheme included a lot of orange (for furniture, walls and other decor). This week I found an article in Priceonomics that discusses the dominance of orange and blue in movies.

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but in the past 20-or-so years there’s been a
real catchy trend in major Hollywood movies to constrain the palette to
orange and blue. The color scheme, also known as “orange and teal” or
“amber and teal” is the scourge of film critics – one of whom calls this
era of cinema a “dark age.”

Lots of photos and discussion at the link, but the TL;DR is expressed in this comment at Into The Abyss:

You see, flesh tones exist mostly in the orange range and when you look to the opposite end of the color wheel from that, where does one land? Why looky here, we have our old friend Mr. Teal. And anyone who has ever taken color theory 101 knows that if you take two complementary colors and put them next to each other, they will "pop", and sometimes even vibrate. So, since people (flesh-tones) exist in almost every frame of every movie ever made, what could be better than applying complementary color theory to make people seem to "pop" from the background.

The American public and U.S. scientists are light-years apart on science
issues. And 98 percent of surveyed scientists say it's a problem that
we don't know what they're talking about...

In eight of 13 science-oriented issues, there was a 20-percentage-point
or higher gap separating the opinions of the public and members of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, according to survey
work by the Pew Research Center. The gaps didn't correlate to any
liberal-conservative split; the scientists at times take more
traditionally conservative views and at times more liberal.

"These are big and notable gaps," said Lee Rainie, director of Pew's
internet, science and technology research. He said they are "pretty
powerful indicators of the public and the scientific community seeing
the world differently."

In
the most dramatic split, 88 percent of the scientists surveyed said it
is safe to eat genetically modified foods, while only 37 percent of the
public say it is safe and 57 percent say it is unsafe. And 68 percent of
scientists said it is safe to eat foods grown with pesticides, compared
with only 28 percent of the general public.

Ninety-eight
percent of scientists say humans evolved over time, compared with 65
percent of the public. The gap wasn't quite as large for vaccines, with
86 percent of the scientists favoring mandatory childhood shots while 68
percent of the public did.

Everyone seems a little wary, but confident, as the girl runs through the
rules of the game, telling us that we will get hints from her whenever she
thinks we need them (“No one has ever done it without hints, there is no
shame in getting hints”), and that each key or code we find will only work
on one door or safe. It all sounds rather straightforward and, dare I say,
eminently doable – until she drops the bomb that only 50 per cent of people make it out in time.

The next hour passes in an incomprehensible blur of searching, re-searching,
punching numbers into safes, punching other numbers into safes, locks, keys,
map coordinates and, at one point, a UV torch... The hints that appear on the count-down screen started as a slow trickle, but
by 50 minutes in are coming thick and fast.

Three other London-based "escape games" are listed at the link.

Addendum: In March 2015 The Guardian posted a feature story on this topic.

The article notes that the tats were created not with a needle, but by making a laceration and then rubbing charcoal into it.

In 2011 I wrote a post entitled The Face of Ötzi the Iceman regarding a recently-completed forensic reconstruction. At that time reader Judyofthewoods offered the opinion that these tattoos marked acupuncture or acupressure points. She offered a link to a relevant article in Acupuncure Today:

Experts from three acupuncture societies then examined the locations of
the tattoos. In their opinion, nine tattoos could be identified as being
located directly on, or within six millimeters of, traditional
acupuncture points. Two more were located on an acupuncture meridian.
One tattoo was used as a local point. The remaining three tattoos were
situated between 6-13mm from the closest acupuncture point.

The last time the Census Bureau calculated this was in 2007, when it
found that a typical American will move 11.7 times in their lives. We
redid the math using the most recent data (2013 for mobility and 2010
for population estimates) and reached a slightly lower number of 11.3 lifetime moves.

I have moved 11 times in my lifetime (8 cities in 8 states). I thought that was unusual. Not so.

Harald's nickname "Bluetooth" first documented appearance is in the Chronicon Roskildense from 1140. The usual explanation is that Harald must have had a conspicuous bad tooth that has been "blue" (i.e. black, as "blue" meant dark).

Another explanation, is that he was called Thegn in England (corrupted to "tan" when the name came back into Old Norse) — in England, Thane meant chief. Since blue meant "dark", his nickname was really "dark chieftain".

A third theory, according to curator at the Royal Jelling Hans Ole Mathiesen, was that Harald went about clothed in blue. The blue color was in fact the most expensive, so by walking in blue Harald underlined his royal dignity.

At the cognitive level, systemic administration of young blood plasma
into aged mice improved age-related cognitive impairments in both
contextual fear conditioning and spatial learning and memory... Our data indicate that exposure of aged mice to young blood late in life
is capable of rejuvenating synaptic plasticity and improving cognitive
function.

Anatomically, it was clear that these mice formed more structural and
functional connections between neurons, or nerve cells, while they also
turned on more genes associated with the formation of new nerve
connections.

Furthermore, the researchers found that a protein called Creb became
more activated in the brain region known as the hippocampus, and that
this increased activity was associated with the anatomical and cognitive
improvements the team observed...

Identifying and getting rid of aging factors in old blood, or supplying
youthful factors from young blood, might both be worthwhile strategies
to combat aging...

Thun says that when a pine tree dies, it secretes a great deal of resin, which deters the microorganisms needed for decomposition. “Nevertheless, preventing the natural breakdown of the wood for centuries is quite a feat”, he says...

Resin was one of the ingredients used in Ancient Egypt for mummification, so its conservation abilities have been known for millennia. However, that trees could “self-mummify” in such a humid climate for centuries was new to the NTNU scientists.

“Many of the trunks we dated turned out to have seeded in the early 1200s, and had lived for more than 100 years at the time of the Black Death around 1350”, Thun says. “That means that the dead wood has ‘survived’ in nature for more than 800 years without breaking down.”

More at the link. The tree in the photo grew began growing in 1334, and died in 1513! Reposted from 2009. Photo credit: Terje Thun, NTNU.

27 January 2015

"Molten gold was poured down his throat." Modern forensic pathologists reproduce the death of a Spanish governor of colonial Ecuador in 1599. They suggest that the reports of his bowels bursting may have been the result of steam generated by the procedure.

Over a century ago someone left a .44-40 Winchester rifle leaning against a juniper tree in Nevada. It was just found, slightly the worse for exposure. The photo at right shows why it was hard for the owner and subsequent passers-by to spot.

Rechargeable lithium batteries are dangerous as plane cargo because when packed in bulk they can ignite. "Shipments of rechargeable batteries on passenger planes are supposed to
be limited to no more than a handful in one box... But a loophole lets shippers pack many small boxes in one shipment and get around the rules. Tens of thousands
of the batteries may be packed into pallets or containers and loaded
into the cargo holds of wide-body passenger planes.

Jamie Diamond, CEO of JPMorganChase, complains that the financial sector is facing crippling over-regulation. "In the old days," Dimon said, "you dealt with one regulator when you had an issue, maybe two. “Now it’s five or six. It makes it very difficult and very complicated.
"You all should ask the question about how American that is. And how fair that is," he added. "And how complex that is for companies." In other news, "JPMorgan Chase earned $4.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2014, the company announced on Wednesday, down from a year ago, but capping what CEO Jamie Dimon called a record year for the biggest U.S. bank by assets."

The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven was recently pulled from bookstores after the author recanted his testimony and said “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven.” I find it most interesting that the author's name is Malarkey.

If you are in your car in a traffic jam on an icy interstate highway, the last thing you want to see in your rear-view mirror is an 18-wheeler jackknifing behind you and sliding toward your car. This is a terrifying video (safe for work etc); I'm impressed by the calmness of the driver photographing the incident. His blinking emergency flashers add a surreal soundscape to the video.

Public Domain Review offers a well-written extensive article about Lord Byron (left, in Albanian dress), Polidori, and the birth of the modern vampire story.

An op-ed piece at Vice's Motherboard is entitled "The Most Anti-Science Congress in Recent History is Now in Session." "That explicit brand of denial is prominent in the party’s new Senate
leadership. Many of the men—and they are all men—who are now stationed
in the nation’s most influential science posts each exhibit views that
can be considered science-illiterate at best, and at worst, outright
hostile to modern scientific inquiry."

If you don't like basketball, take at look at this remarkable hockey goal (performed at an exhibition). I believe it's referred to as a "Michigan", named after this classic goal in 2007 and lots of young hockey players can do them.

I've seen this phenomenon all my life (especially when monitoring clouds while hiking or fishing) but didn't know the term. And now I also realize that for decades I've been incorrectly using "sublimate" as a verb ("A lot of the snow sublimated this weekend") when I should have said "sublimed." You learn something every day.

Last year, beginning about Halloween, thousands of juvenile auklets started washing ashore dead from California's Farallon Islands to Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) off central British Columbia. Since then the deaths haven't stopped. Researchers are wondering if the die-off might spread to other birds or even fish.

"This is just massive, massive, unprecedented," said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. "We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far."

By comparison, not one of the five largest U.S. bird mortality events tracked by USGS since 1980 is estimated to have topped 11,000 deaths. In Europe, according to the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the worst die-off on record occurred in 1983, when 57,000 guillemots, razorbills, puffins, and other seabirds perished in the North Sea and washed up on the British coast.

"You get some of this with seabirds every year," said David Nuzum, with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. "You get so many juveniles out there, and they've got this steep learning curve for feeding after being separated from their parents, so you always get a die-off in winter. But I've never seen anything like this, ever, and I've been here since 1985."

But that was so long agoThat I can scarcely feel the way I felt before.And if time could heal the woundsI would tear the threads awayThat I might bleed some more.

A classic and very evocative song, written by Gordon Lightfoot in 1971. For inexplicable reasons, the creator of this video chose to illustrate a plaintive tune with a manic flurry of images. But at least it's the original album track, not a cover.

24 January 2015

Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy), which is currently at naked-eye brightness and near its brightest, has been showing an exquisitely detailed ion tail. As the name implies, the ion tail is made of ionized gas -- gas energized by ultraviolet light from the Sun and pushed outward by the solar wind. The solar wind is quite structured and sculpted by the Sun's complex and ever changing magnetic field. The effect of the variable solar wind combined with different gas jets venting from the comet's nucleus accounts for the tail's complex structure...

The blue color of the ion tail is dominated by recombining carbon monoxide molecules, while the green color of the coma surrounding the head of the comet is created mostly by a slight amount of recombining diatomic carbon molecules...

Comet Lovejoy made its closest pass to the Earth two weeks ago and will be at its closest to the Sun in about ten days. After that, the comet will fade as it heads back into the outer Solar System, to return only in about 8,000 years.

This is your feel-good video of the week, which I found at Oregon Expat.

Note from the OP: "Many of you have pointed out that Derby's prosthetics seem too low. We
started this way to give him a chance to get used to his new legs. But
with 3D printing it's easy to iterate design, so he is being fitted with
progressively longer legs until he reaches his optimal height. Work is
ongoing and we are about to 3D print the 4th version of his prosthetics.﻿"

Following the AFC championship game, there were allegations that some member of the New England Patriots staff may have provided their team with slightly underinflated footballs (which would be easier to grip in cold wet weather).

Newsday reported that Jackson then gave the ball to a member of the
Colts' equipment staff, who noticed the ball seemed underinflated. At
that point, coach Chuck Pagano and general manager Ryan Grigson were
notified, and Grigson alerted NFL director of football operations Mike
Kensil, according to the report...

On the first offensive play from scrimmage in the third quarter,
following a kick return, referee Walt Anderson briefly stopped play to
replace a football which could have been related to this issue.

I'm puzzled by the claim that the underinflation was investigated by weighing the ball:

The professional football is supposed to weigh between 14 and 15 ounces, inflated to between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch. Can an inflation discrepancy be detected by weighing the ball? Seems doubtful.

Addendum #2: This topic is going to be in the news for quite a while. Today The Guardian describes how altering game footballs has been going on for a long time:

Retired quarterback Brad Johnson, who played for four teams over 17 NFL seasons, said he “paid some guys off to get the balls right”
ahead of his lone Super Bowl appearance with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
after the 2002 season. (His team’s 48-21 victory over the Oakland
Raiders suggests it might have worked.)

Johnson’s opponent in that game, Rich Gannon, told CBS Sports:
“Ask any quarterback, and this is a non-issue. Everybody does something
to them. It’s like a pitcher, he wants the ball a certain way.” Former
quarterback Boomer Esiason declared, “Everybody is doing the same
thing.”

For those who argue that the deflated balls were weather-related and affected both teams, it's important to note that each team plays with its own balls(the media are replete with double-entendre phrases like this - no need to repeat them in the comments here). And the blame will not fall on the players or the coaches:

But the quarterback need not alter the ball himself or instruct that
anyone do so; he only need over the course of 13 years make known to the
Patriots how he likes his footballs. But if some member of the Patriots staff acted without Brady or coach
Bill Belichick’s knowledge or permission — and if the NFL can never
prove what happened — then both men can justifiably deny wrongdoing even
if they somehow share the guilt.

It's easy to predict that that is how this will all come down - with some minor lackey in the dungeons of the football stadium being castigated (and perhaps surreptitiously recompensed).

So that's the end of "Deflategate" in my view. More interesting is this report from Sharp Football Analysis which notes that it is statistically unlikely that the New England Patriots achieved their "fewest fumbles" records just by skill -

I immediately noticed something that cannot be overlooked: the issue with ball security and fumbles. Then I remembered this remarkable fact:
The 2014 Patriots were just the 3rd team in the last 25 years to never have lost a fumble at home!

The biggest difference between the Patriots and the other 2 teams who did it was that New England ran between 150 and 200 MORE plays this year than those teams did in the years they had zero home fumbles, making the Patriots stand alone in this unique statistic...

I looked at the last 5 years of data (since 2010) and examined TOTAL FUMBLES in all games (as well as fumbles/game) but more importantly, TOTAL OFFENSIVE PLAYS RUN. Thus, we can to determine average PLAYS per FUMBLE, a much more valuable statistic. The results are displayed in the chart [which I've moved to the top of the post].

Keep in mind, this is for all games since 2010, regardless of indoors, outdoors, weather, site, etc. EVERYTHING. One can CLEARLY SEE the Patriots, visually, are off the chart. There is no other team even close to being near to their rate of 187 offensive plays (passes+rushes+sacks) per fumble. The league average is 105 plays/fumble. Most teams are within 21 plays of that number...

The Patriots are so “off the map” when it comes to either fumbles or
only fumbles lost. As mentioned earlier: this is an extremely abnormal
occurrence and is NOT simply random fluctuation.

To really confirm something was dramatically different in New England,
starting in 2007 thru present, I compared the 2000-06 time period (when
Bill Belichick was their head coach and they won all of their Super
Bowls) to the 2007-2014 time period. The beauty of data is the results
speak for themselves:

(Note the above chart of "fumble rates" expresses the data as "touches per fumble," so a higher number is a better performance).

In 2006, Tom Brady (and Peyton Manning) lobbied in favor of changing a
NFL rule, and as a result, the NFL agreed to change policies. Brady
wanted the NFL to let EVERY team provide its OWN footballs to use on
offense, even when that team was playing on the road. Prior to that year, the HOME team provided ALL the footballs, meaning the
home quarterback selected the footballs the ROAD quarterback would play
with on offense...

The statistical “jump” the Patriots make in the 2006 offseason, from one
fumble every 39 plays to one fumble every 76 plays is nothing short of
remarkable. Their trendline over this period is not even close to that
of the rest of the NFL.

Nick was heading off to start his senior year at Pomona College in
California, back in August 2009, when cops detained, aggressively
interrogated, handcuffed, and locked him in a jail cell for nearly five
hours at the Philadelphia International Airport.

Why was he targeted? Because Nick, a dual major in physics and Middle
Eastern studies, was carrying a set of English-Arabic flashcards in for
his language class--and Rogue Nation, a book critical of U.S. foreign policy that was written by a former Reagan administration official.

She was in mid-sentence talking to me when a Philadelphia police
officer appeared behind me and ordered me to put my hands behind my
back. He cuffed my hands, grabbed my arms, and, in full view of the rest
of the passengers, walked me through the entire Philadelphia airport
and into the police substation.No one informed me of my rights, and no one would tell me why I was being not just searched but arrested by police, when I was in violation of no law. I had never been arrested, and no one knew I was there.

The police officer left me in a cell at the police station for
several more hours. He did not uncuff my hands from behind my back. He
did not tell me what I was being held for. He did not tell me how long I
would be there. After about two hours I asked to go to the bathroom,
and on the way back I again asked why I was being held. He answered me
with the same attitude the TSA agent had shown me: "I dunno, what'd you
do?"

This is the American we have created for ourselves. In the news now because he just received a settlement of his lawsuit.

During the last presidential campaign, a recurring theme was that of independence from government support, a claim made proudly to counteract Obama's perceived "socialist" tendencies.

This past week, one of the rebuttals to Obama's State of the Union address was given by Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who proudly described how she wore plastic bread bags over her shoes as a mark of her family's humble roots and ability to live within their means. What she conveniently left out was her family's acceptance of federal farm subsidies:

The truth about her family’s farm roots and living within one’s means,
however, is more complex. Relatives of Ernst (née: Culver), based in Red
Oak, Iowa (population: 5,568) have received over $460,000 in farm
subsidies between 1995 and 2009. Ernst’s father, Richard Culver,
was given $14,705 in conservation payments and $23,690 in commodity
subsidies by the federal government–with all but twelve dollars
allocated for corn support. Richard’s brother, Dallas Culver, benefited from $367,141 in federal agricultural aid, with over $250,000 geared toward corn subsidies.

23 January 2015

It actually most closely resembles a jaw harp, a small instrument played with the mouth that produces a distinctive twanging sound. The possibility that this is the intended meaning of the symbol at first seems untenable, as it does not appear to fit the phrase in any logical way. Inserting the common French term for the instrument, guimbarde, gives us nothing, as does the German term maultrommel. However, discovering earlier French names for it, jeu-trompe and trompe de Béarn, suddenly supplies the image with a double entendre. If the word “trompe” is inserted in the phrase, an unexpectedly negative phrase emerges: “Le coeur de dames trompe le monde”, or “The hearts of women deceive the world”. There is little doubt that this is the correct interpretation, as it is a known proverb. The phrase in fact appeared on the Queen of Hearts in a playing card ca. 1500. Yet while this mystery is solved, the question of how it relates to, and informs the image above, is just as cryptic.

The Jew's harp, also known as the jaw harp, mouth harp, Ozark harp, trump, or juice harp, is a lamellophone instrument, which is in the category of plucked idiophones: it consists of a flexible metal or bamboo tongue or reed attached to a frame. The tongue/reed is placed in the performer's mouth and plucked with the finger to produce a note.
This instrument is considered to be one of the oldest musical instruments in the world; a musician apparently playing it can be seen in a Chinese drawing from the 4th century BC.

Despite its common English name, and the sometimes used Jew's trump, it has no particular connection with Jews or Judaism...

The instrument is known in many different cultures by many different names. The common English name "Jew's harp" is sometimes considered controversial or potentially misleading, and is thus avoided by a few speakers or manufacturers... Other speakers believe the avoidance of the term to be offensive and deliberately use the term so as not to cause offense. Another name used to identify the instrument, especially in scholarly literature, is the older English trump, while guimbarde, the French word for the instrument, can be found in unabridged dictionaries and is featured in recent revival efforts.

A significant number of heavy computer users experience a range of symptoms that researchers group under the umbrella phrase "computer vision syndrome."...

Studies have shown that when people read from computer screens, their blink rate plummets — but this also happens when people read words from a printed page. In either case, when you blink less frequently, your eyes are much more likely to become dried out....

Eye strain is the second-most common complaint of computer vision syndrome, and can be accompanied by headaches and pain in or around the eyes... It may also lead to a related problem: difficulty focusing...

Observational studies have found that, in general, a person's level of education — and thus the amount of reading they've done over their lifetime — is positively correlated with their risk of myopia. But the direction of causation could go either way: they could have read more growing up, becoming both more educated and myopic, or for various reasons people prone to myopia could be more likely to read more...

Every twenty minutes, a person should look away from their desk for twenty seconds, and focus on something at least twenty feet away," he says. This prevents your eyes from focusing at near distances for extremely long durations, forcing them to alter their focal distance. It's also a good idea to consciously do some blinking at this sort of regular interval, in order to prevent excessive dryness.
Your desk should also be set up in a way to minimize eye stress. It's recommended that your monitor be positioned 20 to 40 inches in front of your eyes, and the top of the monitor should line up with your eye level, so you're looking down about 15 degrees when you stare at the screen.

Smithsonian offers a list of seven locations in North America where Monarch butterflies can be seen in large numbers.

Point Pelee National Park, Ontario, Canada
"Because the migration happens over such a considerable distance, butterflies look for shortcuts whenever they can, which is what makes Point Pelee such a desirable spot—located on a peninsula that juts into Lake Erie, the site gives thousands of monarchs a head-start on their southward journey. After following the shape of the peninsula, the butterflies will funnel to the tip of the point and wait for a breeze to help them begin their migration"

Monarch Butterfly Grove: Pismo Beach, California
"From mid-October through mid-February, thousands of monarchs congregate on the grove's trees, providing visitors with a spectacular sight. One of the largest in the nation, the grove at Pismo Beach regularly hosts around 25,000 butterflies each season."

Monarch Grove Sanctuary: Pacific Grove, California
"...monarchs arrive by the thousands to rest on the thick branches of eucalyptus trees. Located in a city park, the sanctuary is free and open to visitors from sunrise to sunset."

Goleta Monarch Butterfly Grove: Goleta, California
"...in 2011, the wintering population peaked at 47,510). The preserve is open sunrise to sunset, and admission is free. Docents are available to lead tours around midday on weekends."

Natural Bridges State Beach: Santa Cruz, California
"...at peak numbers, some 100,000 monarchs come to the area to enjoy the mild, oceanside climate and rest in the preserve's eucalyptus trees."

Monarch Biosphere Reserve: Michoacán, Mexico
"In 2008, the Monarch Biosphere Reserve was named a Unesco World Heritage Site for its critical role in supporting populations of the migrating butterflies. Monarchs come to the area by the millions—sometimes, by the billions—to escape the cold northern winters."

Piedra Herrada: Los Saucos, Mexico
"More remote than areas to the north, visitors usually take horses up the steep incline, then hike through thick vegetation to reach the butterflies."

You guys in southern California are so lucky. If you are a reader of this blog and have never taken the time to visit one of the winter Monarch sanctuaries, I'm disappointed in you.

22 January 2015

Ever since my childhood in the Upper Midwest, I've understood that one of the factors leading to the great "Dust Bowl" disaster of the 1930s was the destruction of the native grasslands by farmers. But it takes an image to really drive it home - such as the one above comparing the root systems of a perennial wheatgrass with those of modern annual winter wheat. A National Geographic article explains that humans have always favored annuals over perennials because the short lifespans promote selective breeding:

Humans made an unwitting but fateful choice 10,000 years ago as we
started cultivating wild plants: We chose annuals. All the grains that
feed billions of people today—wheat, rice, corn, and so on—come from
annual plants, which sprout from seeds, produce new seeds, and die every
year. "The whole world is mostly perennials," says USDA geneticist
Edward Buckler, who studies corn at Cornell University. "So why did we
domesticate annuals?" Not because annuals were better, he says, but
because Neolithic farmers rapidly made them better—enlarging their
seeds, for instance, by replanting the ones from thriving plants, year
after year. Perennials didn't benefit from that kind of selective
breeding, because they don't need to be replanted. Their natural
advantage became a handicap. They became the road not taken.

We pay a steep price for our reliance on high yields and shallow roots,
says soil scientist—and National Geographic emerging explorer—Jerry
Glover of the Land Institute. Because annual root crops mostly tap into
only the top foot or so of soil, that layer gets depleted, forcing
farmers to rely on large amounts of fertilizers to maintain high yields.
Often less than half the fertilizer in the Midwest gets taken up by
crops; much of it washes into the Gulf of Mexico, where it fertilizes
algae blooms that cause a vast dead zone around the mouth of the
Mississippi. Annuals also promote heavy use of pesticides or tillage
because they leave the ground bare much of the year. That allows weeds
to invade.

The article goes on to explain that scientists are aggressively pursuing the concept of creating deep-rooted perennials that can serve as food plants. This topic was considered in greater depth in Discover Magazine last spring:

Now we also have much better tools in plant breeding. We have much more
powerful, faster computers that allow us to sift through the genetic
material to determine which characteristics are going to be more
productive...

I recommend focusing first on the perennial types of legumes, given the
protein needs of many of the developing countries. The great benefit is
that legumes contribute to cropping systems; they can help take nitrogen
out of the atmosphere and make it available in the soil.

African soils were in general less fertile and less well-suited for
agricultural production than American soils from the beginning. Farmers
in Africa are often faced by the big challenge of working with
inherently old, highly weathered soil... I think ultimately they could be more productive than our annual grain
crops because they are able to capture more sunlight, water and
nutrients. But the urgency in developed countries isn’t there.

Somewhere this past week (I've lost the link), I saw a comment by ?Bill Nye. When asked why some people fail to believe in the concept of evolution, he said the fundamental thing they failed to grasp was the concept of "deep time" (geologic time scales).

Changes of adaptations that appear impossibly complicated (or illogically perfect) become understandable if/when one considers that the change has happened over the course of, say, 200 million years.

I encountered an example of the importance of "deep time" while reading an article in Smithsonian magazine yesterday:

The rock beneath me, which
looks almost white in the glare of the sun, is full of fossils. Zillions
of them. Back when these life-forms were alive—265 million years ago or
so—the Guadalupe Mountains were underwater, part of a flourishing reef
that once stretched about 400 miles around the edge of a long-vanished
sea.

Reefs are a fascinating fusion of biology and geology.
They are, after all, made of stone—but built by life. Moreover,
although the individual life-forms involved are typically tiny, the
results of their activities can be gigantic, resulting
in a massive transformation of the landscape. As usual, Charles Darwin
put it better than anyone. Writing about corals, he said: “We feel
surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids
and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of
these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the
agency of various minute and tender animals!”

Mountains built by life. Literally. To
give a couple of examples, the volume of coral built up on the
Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands is around 250 cubic miles. This
is equivalent to building the Great Pyramid of Giza more than 416,000
times. And that’s just one atoll: The Earth has scores. The Great
Barrier Reef, which runs for more than 1,800 miles along the
northeastern coast of Australia, comprises about 3,000 reefs and 900
islands. It is the largest structure built by living beings in the
modern world.

If "deep time" challenges our comprehension of time, then "deep space" is its counterpart on a spatial scale. I covered this topic briefly about five years ago by showing the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field photo.

NASA has just released a newer image, though not of "deep space" per se. It is a 1.5 billion pixel image of just a small portion of one galaxy. I invite you to view the video at the top - at fullscreen settings - while contemplating that each one of those dots is a sun (or a collection of suns). By the end of the panning in the video, one winds up at the galactic center where the number of suns are so great that the light is confluent. Followed by the "gotcha" moment of the final pullback to show that you're not looking at the Milky Way - merely one component of it.There is some discussion at SlashGear.

But reading about it is I think less important than just contemplating the image in the video and its implications.

Mr. Medalie’s directive also specifies something more unusual: If he develops Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia, he refuses “ordinary means of nutrition and hydration.”

A retired lawyer with a proclivity for precision, he has listed 10 triggering conditions, including “I cannot recognize my loved ones” and “I cannot articulate coherent thoughts and sentences.”

If any three such disabilities persist for several weeks, he wants his health care proxy — his wife, Beth Lowd — to ensure that nobody tries to keep him alive by spoon-feeding or offering him liquids. VSED, short for “voluntarily stopping eating and drinking,” is not unheard-of as an end-of-life strategy, typically used by older adults who hope to hasten their decline from terminal conditions. But now ethicists, lawyers and older adults themselves have begun a quiet debate about whether people who develop dementia can use VSED to end their lives by including such instructions in an advance directive...

Even
in the few states where physicians can legally prescribe lethal
medication for the terminally ill, laws require that patients be
mentally competent and able to ingest those drugs themselves. Mr.
Medalie would prefer that option if he were to become demented,
preferably with the barbiturates dissolved in “a little vodka.”

But
demented patients don’t qualify for so-called death with dignity. VSED
is a lawful way to hasten death for competent adults who find life with a
progressive, irreversible disease unendurable...

“Neglecting
basic human comfort care is a big source of elder abuse complaints and
criminal prosecutions.” And if a patient demands that his basic care be
withheld in the event of dementia? “Nobody from a legal perspective has
really meaningfully grappled with that,” he said.

In
several states, including New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota and New
Hampshire, legislatures have banned the withdrawal of oral nutrition or
hydration at all, no matter what a directive or a proxy says.

More at the link. Worth a read for those dealing with a family member with dementia.

21 January 2015

I decided to participate in National Geographic's Genographic Project, which uses "cutting-edge genetic and computational technologies to analyze
historical patterns in DNA from participants around the world to better
understand our human genetic roots."

I submitted a sample of my DNA.

The reported results are separated into your maternal and paternal lines. This is my mother's branch:

After leaving Africa, this haplogroup headed north. It was gratifying to see the heavy density of these haplogroup markers in Scandinavia, since my mother's ancestry is traceable back to the Fjaerland Fjord in central Norway.

As my father's genetic ancestry was being revealed, I had a moment to wonder whether there had been some indiscretion on my mother's part...

... so I was pleased (but not surprised) to find the next subset in my father's gene pool had opted out of the trip to Southeast Asia and headed back West toward Europe...

... where the hottest spot for the genetic marker is in central Europe, corresponding to my father's German heritage.

This was an expensive undertaking (kit purchase information here), but in my view fully worth the cost just to satisfy my curiosity and in a tiny way to contribute to the pool of information being assembled.

Addendum: One reader has pointed out that "Women do not carry a Y chromosome, this test will not reveal
direct paternal deep ancestry for female participants. Women will
learn other information about their paternal side of the family,
however. It still cost the same as for the men, however."

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 American documentary film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara illustrating his observations of the nature of modern warfare. The film was directed by Errol Morris and features an original score by Philip Glass.

The film won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Reviews for the film were very positive. The film received an overall score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, thus obtaining a "Certified Fresh" rating.

Toothbrushes at the National Museum of Dentistry include, from left to
right: A miswak or chew stick, an early 20th century celluloid
toothbrush by Taub, a rubber-tipped gum stimulator and toothbrush from
pre-1945, a Strockway rotary toothbrush from the 1950s, a Dr. Mayland’s
rubber toothbrush from the 1920s, a 1930s Rotor toothbrush, and another
chew stick.

Since at least 3000 B.C., people in the Mesopotamian region used the
frayed ends of fibrous twigs or chew sticks, also known as miswak or
siwak sticks, to clean their teeth. “Different cultures have used twigs
from trees and shrubs with wood grain that is very intertwined,” says
Scott Swank, a dentist, historian, and curator of the National Museum of Dentistry.
“You peel the bark off and chew it to get the fibers to fray out, and
then you use those frayed fibers to clean your teeth. They’re still used
today in some parts of Africa and the Middle East.”

Much more at the link, including information on "toothworms":

“Many people in the past believed ‘tooth worms’ were the cause of tooth
decay—tiny creatures that would bore holes in people’s teeth,” explains
Fitzharris. Records indicate that the fear of tooth worms goes back at
least to the time of the Sumerians, or around 5,000 years ago... “Often, practitioners would try to smoke the worm out by heating a
mixture of beeswax and henbane seed on a piece of iron and directing the
fumes into the cavity with a funnel,” Fitzharris says. “Afterwards, the
hole was filled with powdered henbane seed and gum mastic, which may
have provided temporary relief given the fact that henbane is a mild
narcotic.

And this about George Washington's dentures:

By the time Washington was elected president at age 57, he only had one
natural tooth remaining in his mouth. “During the presidency, he lost
that one, too,” says Swank. [note the hole in his dentures, designed to accommodate that last tooth]

And finally:

By the mid-19th century, dentures were often referred to as “Waterloo
Teeth,” after those surreptitiously ripped from the bodies of dead
soldiers following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815... While publicly frowned upon, stealing teeth from dead soldiers continued throughout the Crimean War and the American Civil War.

According to Fox affiliate WTVT, officials at Jewett Middle Academy e-mailed parents to inform them of the drill, after it took place.
By that point, WTVT reports, cellphones were already filling up with
texts from frightened students, who thought there was a real shooter in
the school.

Winter Haven police told The Post that one of the officers had his duty firearm – a handgun – drawn. The gun was loaded, as
required. The other officer was carrying an unloaded AR-15. According
to Ray, one of her other children texted: “I thought he was going to
shoot me.”

“We don’t want students to be scared, but we need them to be safe.”

That's one viewpoint. Others would argue that a pre-announced drill would be educational; a surprise drill is designed to frighten and intimidate.

But not all active shooter drills are surprises: WTVT spoke to officials
in two neighboring Florida counties, where police said that their
officers conduct drills in empty schools, usually over a holiday break.

Franç​ois Simard, creator of Protec-Style, has a contract with Parks
Canada to supply national parks with oil-spill kits. The kits come with
various sizes of absorbent tubes filled with milkweed fibre. Simard says milkweed has a unique ability to repel water, which makes it perfect for oil spills on land or water.

"You can leave an absorbent [milkweed] sock in water and it will only absorb the oil..."

The white fibres that you can often see floating in the fall breeze are
light and hollow and able to absorb four times more oil than
polypropylene, the artificial product now used to clean up spills.

Simard has set up a co-operative of 20 farmers in Quebec to grow 325
hectares of milkweed. He says there are another 35 growers on a waiting
list.

"It's less expensive to use milkweed to collect the oil that was spilled
in nature because you have more capacity, you need less absorbent,
therefore there is less of a cost of disposal," said Simard.

And of course the benefits to Monarch butterflies are obvious:

"There were so many butterflies in the field that people on the road …
had to stop," he says. "They were wondering what was happening. It was
just growing 20 hectares that made the whole difference."

More at the link. Photo from my files. Posted for my aunt, who in her childhood used to harvest milkweed seed pods for use in making life preservers for the armed forces.

This [very] amateur footage of a serious Runway Incursion on a rural airstrip
in Alaska shows our Fairchild C119 FlyingBoxcar taking off on a runway
that is too short and too soft on a ferry flight. The plane had
forced-landed there years ago to begin with...So this was the first
takeoff after the plane had sat there for more than 13 years being
vandalized etc. We had changed out one engine, windows and ball bearings
and worked on it straight for over half a year. We have been given 7
videos of this takeoff by the locals and the FAA used the footage to
teach about the feared "runway incursions". We have it on tape how our
pilot preaches from the cockpit window to the assembled villagers that
he will use every inch of available runway and THEN SOME beyond that,
nevertheless we had a father and son standing in the way of the plane
plus two others while a village schoolteacher and professional pilot was
arguing with them about getting off the runway...Quite amazing, as said
we have 7 camerapositions...Nobody died but the son did actually go
through the Prop arc and had the luck to pass through the blades with no
harm to him. R3350's run 2950 RPM on takeoff and the reduction gear
reduces Prop RPM and at 94 knots it was some space between the 4 blades
of the Prop. "

This video link was sent to me by my brother-in-law, who is an air traffic controller. In the YouTube comment thread the OP responds to a question as to whether someone actually did "go through" the propellors:

From the 6 camera-positions & videotapes, as well as the still photos, That is what we have concluded, there is no other possibility. The 7th tape, being from the camera that the Kid held while he went
through the prop-arc, I have never seen. Many people that saw it told me about it, there was no doubt !﻿

I did some rough calculations this morning. The plane's velocity at the end of the runway was reported at 94 knots = 108 mph = 158 fps. The "reduction gear" ratio for the propellors is not defined; let's say the RPM were reduced from 2950 to 2400 (anyone know/guess?) It's a 4-blade propellor, so 2400 RPM results in 9600
blade-passes per minute, or one blade coming by every 1/9600
minute. Divide by 60 = 160 passes per second.

160 passes per second in a plane moving forward 158 fps would give a space of about 1 foot for the head to pass through. The person who pulled this stunt probably had a small head to begin with.

If you never walk through a stationary
prop arc due to a conscious decision to avoid it, when you hurry across
the flight deck it is less likely that you will walk through a turning
prop arc. FACT: People who have been killed by prop arcs were familiar
with the aircraft and flight deck around them, but a momentary lapse of
concentration caused them to stray into a turning propeller.

I suppose there is one possible lesson to be learned here. If one finds oneself in a real-life action-movie scenario with a propellor blade coming toward you, and if there is no way to stop it and no way to avoid it and a physical encounter is unavoidable, then one's chances are statistically improved by rushing toward the spinning blades as fast as possible.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net